“It’s the Libyans! They’re at the front gate! Tower, take them out!”
Reluctantly the sniper lifted the big Dragunov from the table and took it to the front portal of the tower. The Gray Man was someone else’s problem now; he needed to engage the distant targets, the Libyans.
The Gray Man was no longer distant. He was close.
Just outside the sniper’s tower, the black Eurocopter hovered low above the roof’s walkway. Four heavily armed Saudi operators in tactical gear poured out and dropped the six feet to the flat eastern roof. They ignored the gunfight now raging at the front of the building. Instead, they all took up positions behind the decorative battlements overlooking the back garden and the lone man running towards them over open ground.
As Gentry closed on his objective, he redirected his fire from the tower above the château to a first-floor window where bright muzzle flashes flickered. Gentry emptied his first magazine at the window in front of him. The walls around the window pocked, granite snapped off in dusty chunks, glass shattered, and the lace draperies whipped left and right as a few lucky shots from Court’s rifle found their mark though the space. It was difficult firing at a full sprint, impossible to accurately aim. Court saw no more muzzle flashes from the window but instead noticed the sleek, black Eurocopter above and in front of him, and the men who leapt from it.
“Fuck!” He was still seventy yards from cover. He pushed his legs even harder to get as close to the château as possible before the men now exiting the black chopper could get in position to open up on him. Here on the flat lawn he’d be a sitting duck to aimed fire.
Gentry pulled a fragmentation grenade off his vest as he ran, yanked the pin out with his teeth, and let the spoon fly. A large, blond-haired figure appeared in a window on the third floor directly in front of him, raised a handgun, and shot through the glass. Court dove forward at the wet, green grass to avoid the fire, landed on his right shoulder, and executed a forward roll. As he came out of the roll, he rose to his feet. His running and his somersault had given his body an incredible amount of momentum, momentum he used to throw the grenade as high and as far as he could. From forty-five yards away the potato-sized bomb whizzed through the air in an arc, rose over the edge of the parapets, and exploded, just missing the Eurocopter, which escaped into the sky, fleeing from the fight as fast as possible. The blast above the Saudis’ heads killed one man outright and injured one more in the neck and back. The other two had found cover in time, but they’d missed their opportunity to get an open shot on their target on the lawn.
At the front of the house, two Belarusians and two Libyans were already dead. The guards from Minsk were killed not far from the front gate. They’d been running back to the safety of the château when the vanload of operators from Tripoli busted through the ironwork, the Middle Eastern men firing their Skorpion machine pistols from the moving vehicle. The two Libyans were felled as the van screeched to a stop in the gravel drive. The sniper in the tower took out the operator in the front passenger seat with a round to the face, and the first man out the sliding back took three AK rounds from the only pair of Belarusians still outside the château.
The two remaining Libyans killed the men on the driveway and closed on the front door to the château. They poured automatic fire from their Skorpions into the windows on either side, kept disciplined distance between one another, and shouted calls for cover as they reloaded and repositioned.
Number Two fired half a magazine at each of the two hinges of the heavy oaken door, and then kicked it open. As he reloaded, it crashed into the building in front of him, and he caught a double-tap from a Northern Irish guard in the foyer, spinning the Libyan dead to the ground. The last living Libyan answered the Ul sterman with his Skorpion; blood and tissue splattered across the white wall behind the man in the foyer as he went down.
Riegel had never seen anything like it. The Gray Man had been in his sights; he wore a dark brown shirt with bloodstains on the waist, a drop-leg pistol holster on his right hip, and a magazine sub-load on his left. A black vest and a submachine gun adorned his chest. His head was shaved, and even at fifty yards, Kurt thought he could discern a fierceness in the eyes.
When Riegel drew his handgun and aimed it at the running man, he knew it was a long-distance shot for a pistol, but for a trained target shooter like the German, he should not have missed. But the running man had dropped just below his rounds at exactly the right time, rolled, risen back to his feet, and hurled a grenade into the air. Instinctively, Riegel dove to the ground next to the Tech’s desk, presuming the bomb was meant for him. The detonation blasted just above him on the roof. He heard shouts and screaming through the window now, and he quickly regained his position to get a few more shots off at Gentry as he closed.
But when he looked back out the window, the Gray Man was gone, and now there was no way to stop him from entering the building.
Incredible.
Just as Gentry had promised over the phone the evening before, the prey had become the predator.
Court slammed his back against the wall of the château and reloaded his weapon with a fresh magazine from his thigh rig. Two stories directly above him was the big blond man with the pistol. Above that man would be the shooters from the helicopter. He was reasonably certain he’d thinned their ranks some, but he held no illusions that he’d eliminated the threat on the roof.
To his left and right there were windows waist-high. Glass shattered from Gentry’s HK made them dangerous to enter without prepping them first. To his left were steps up to the main back door, around the corner to his left was the front drive and some sort of battle raging, and to his right was the long back wall lined with windows and then a small set of doors. In a crouch he rushed along the wall, shoulder scraping the stone to stay out of view of the shooters above him.
He was near the door when it opened outwards. As it swung open, he raised his weapon to fire a burst through the wood but hesitated at the last second. What if it was one of the Fitzroys? Court recognized he was not the best man to undertake a rescue operation. He had a tendency to shoot anything that moved in a combat situation; now he had to take that extra moment to ID his target.
A head peered around the edge of the door to him. It was big and Slavic, and when he saw the barrel of a rifle pass the door’s edge, Gentry satisfied himself of the validity of his target. He sent eight rounds through the door as he ran towards it. It was set to lock when it closed, but the doorstop of freshly dead goon kept it open for Gentry as he entered a darkened hallway.
At the first sound of gunfire on the back lawn, Claire and Kate Fitzroy ran to their sleeping Mummy and shook and screamed at her to wake. Once on her feet, Elise stumbled; the girls steadied her with both hands as they led her to the other side of the bedroom where Grandpa Donald sat upright on the four-poster bed. Claire relayed to all that Jim wanted them under the bed, and Grandpa Donald agreed. Mummy fell back asleep facedown on the hardwood. Claire and Kate huddled together in fear, peeking under the bed runner towards the door to the hallway, while Grandpa Donald remained above them.